Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Saturday, June 30, 2012

I viewed my first ever book
trailer on YouTube in 2009. It was the two-and-a-half-minute video trailer
promoting the genre mash-up, Sense
and Sensibility and Sea Monsters by Ben H. Winters, co-authored
with Jane Austin.

At the time, I remember having
reservations about book trailers. They seemed to be the opposite of what
reading was all about, namely using one's imagination to evoke characters and their
various worlds. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the tongue-in-cheek trailer for Winters'
book in which a very convincing tentacle, belonging to a fierce lake-dwelling
serpent, drags the male love interest, Sir John Middleton, into deep and murky
water. Let’s just say his female companion reaches for his hand, finds it in
the water, draws it out, and discovers that it’s not strictly attached anymore.

I have since warmed to book
trailers and keep my eyes peeled for those about New Zealand new releases. Highlights for
me include two beautiful book trailers by Huia Publishers, who celebrate 21
years in business this June. The most recent of these is a book trailer for the
new release Ngarimu — Te Tohu Toa/Victory at Point 209,
illustrated by Andrew Burdan. The graphic novel focuses on Second Lieutenant Te
Moana-nui-a-Kiwa Ngarimu of 28th Maori Battalion who won the VC during World
War Two.
Like many of the best book trailers I’ve seen, Ngarimu —
Te Tohu Toa/Victory at Point 209 uses illustration and animation to
provide a movie-like introduction to the book. You get a quick but informative
sense of the story, characters, tone and narrative style.

Inspired by Andrew
Burdan’s excellent trailer, I thought I’d draw together a selection from
various publishers' YouTube channels that I’ve enjoyed watching. Click through
to our blog Open
Book and watch the selection of trailers

We've all been there.
Sat on a packed commuter train, you reach into your bag and slide out your latest paperback with the caution of skeptic picking a magician's card...
...unconsciously your knees go up and your fingers spread, covering the maximum possible space on the front and back cover.
With a final furtive glance at the people around you, you begin to read.
But it's no good. The book in your hands is a burning source of shame. For reasons as ancient and irrational as civilisation itself, you're embarrassed about how your literary choice makes you look to a group of complete strangers.
But what is the cause of this biblio blush?
A multitude of possible reasons for book shame exist, and here we've helpfully rounded them up into ten basic categories.Be ashamed. Be very ashamed...

Porn Books

...Or call it 'Mummy Porn', if you like - doesn't change a thing. You're still getting your rocks off on public transport, which in any other circumstances would lead to ejection or hard jail time.

Books With Film Covers

"I actually loved the book way before the film version came out" "Oh really? How come you've got the copy with Leonardo DiCaprio's soppy face plastered all over it then?"

Geek Books

There's nothing wrong with having an inner geek, it's just that it's normally keep right there - inner. To a stranger with nothing to judge you on besides your paperback, holding a tale of warlocks and dragons in your lap says only one thing: you're a virgin, en route to your mum's house.

Dodgy Titles

YOU know it's an classic tragicomedy of 20th century literature, but does everyone else? Such has been influence of Lolita that its title has become a byword for pedophilia - and therefore not something you'd necessarily want to flash in front of a group of drunks on the 23:04 out of Charing Cross.

The Book Everyone Else Is Reading

For about two months at the end of 2011, every train carriage in the country was decorated with a line of orange bunting that on closer inspection was actually just 30 copies the same version of One Day, the biggest selling book of the year. Reading isn't particularly cool in the first place, let alone reading the same thing as everyone else.

Anything By Katie Price

Now popular fiction is one thing. No one should be ashamed of reading anything just because it's sold a few copies. But reading the literary equivalent of a vajazzle? Shame on you.

Men are from earth, women from earth: deal with it. Self-help books - particularly any designed to solve your love life - are strictly for bedside reading, lest you want the world to think you're a bumbling, self-obsessed neurotic who is going to burst into tears if you brush past them getting off at your stop.

Macho Man Books

Alan Partridge's favourite books: need we say any more?

'Young Adult' Fiction

A marketing term coined to de-stigmatize reading books written for children, 'young adult' novels are really just for people who can't handle proper grown up stories that don't involve hormonal vampires.

Did a book ever help you cope with bullies? Reader Sacia Flowersonce wrote a long letter to J. K. Rowling explaining how the Harry Potter series helped her cope with bullying and a difficult family life.
The novelist responded with a warm and encouraging letter, sharing some advice that all you people can use during the rough times. Letters of Note has reprinted both letters, sharing them with a wider audience. Here is an excerpt rom Rowling’s letter.
I know what it is like to be picked on, as it happened to me, too, throughout my adolescence. I can only wish that you have the same experience that I did, and become happier and more secure the older you get. Being a teenager can be completely horrible, and many of the most successful people I know felt the same way … You’re now standing on the threshold of a very different phase in your life, one where you are much more likely to find kindred spirits, and much less likely to be subject to the pressures of your teenage years.

From snide reviews to Twitter parodies, plenty have mocked the story's breathless prose and naked cliches, even as E.L. James's sale figures rose to uncontrollable heights of ecstasy.
But as book fans and writers alike know, grinding out a good sex scene is one of the deepest, hardest challenges facing the humble novelist, one that has ravaged the reputation of more than one titan of fiction in the past.
Any approach has its potential pitfalls.
Be too metaphorical, and your sex scene will slip from your grasp with the lithe wriggle of a snagged salmon, up, up, away from your impressive rod and through the sun-stroked streams, deep into a pool of pretension.
Play it too hard and fast, and you'll sound like a crude twat.
So for this reason, we think 50 Shades Of Grey deserves to be cut some slack. From John Updike to James Joyce to, er, Giles Coren and Tony Blair, plenty of highly-regarded wordsmiths have drooped when faced with evoking coitus.Don't believe us? Here's 50 of the funniest, weirdest and most cringe-inducing book sex scenes of all time...

Out
this week, Steven Martin’s Opium
Fiend is a memoir of intense sensual abdication—and a personal
history of the drug that makes the zoning out possible. See 10 more books
aimed to satisfy your craving for cravings.

Stars and Friends Remember Nora Ephron
Mike Nichols, Nicole Kidman, Tom Hanks, and other stars and friends remember writer, filmmaker, and humorist Nora Ephron, who died at 71.
“I am very sad to learn of Nora’s passing. She was a brilliant writer and humorist. Being her Harry to Meg’s Sally will always have a special place in my heart. I was very lucky to get to say her words.”
—Billy Crystal
“Nora Ephron was a journalist/artist who knew what was important to know; how things really worked, what was worthwhile, who was fascinating and why. At a dinner table and on a film set she lifted us all with wisdom and wit mixed with love for us and love for life. Rita and I are so very sad to lose our friend who brought so much joy to all who were lucky enough to know her.”
—Tom Hanks and Rita WilsonRead Mike Nichols, Nicole Kidman, and More

Nora Ephron managed to state truths no one else had seen, never stopped writing and creating—and had a real life. Joan Juliet Buck on being paralyzed by admiration and finally working with her icon on Julie & Julia.Read More .

Ephron was once an essayist and became an accomplished filmmaker, especially of romantic comedies like Sleepless in Seattle, which solidified her voice. Kate Aurthur celebrates the writer and director’s work, from You’ve Got Mail to Silkwood to Heartburn.Read More .

Copyright Licensing Limited (CLL)
has announced that, following the completion of the conversion of 400 New
Zealand titles from print to digital, the services of its company – Digital
Publishing NZ (DPNZ) – will be discontinued.
CLL has been engaged with the New Zealand publishing sector to energise
digital in New Zealand since 2008. Over the past 2 years, DPNZ has worked
alongside independent publishers and authors to up-skill the sector and invest
in conversion and distribution of e-books.

The
board of DPNZ has, over the last year, worked with people within the
industry and outside consultants to investigate the commercial feasibility of
DPNZ. As a result of those investigations on how the local industry might
advance the original objectives it is now clear that the level of investment
required to develop a home grown NZ solution to achieve these initiatives would
outweigh the ability of the industry to invest and earn revenue from these
projects.

Paula Browning, Chief Executive of
CLL says, “It has been an eventful couple of years and in the short time since
DPNZ was established, the digital publishing world has gone through some
exciting changes. With the increase in demand for books in electronic
formats, we are now seeing some of the big names in the publishing world step
into the local market in search of content for distribution”.

One such distributor is
Faber Factory which was set up 18 months ago by the reputable independent
publisher Faber & Faber. Much like DPNZ, Faber Factory was established
to assist independent publishers in the UK to convert, store and distribute
titles through their existing network of international retailers. Recently,
they partnered with The Perseus Books Group in the US to use its Constellation
Digital Services infrastructure. Faber Factory has been successful in
providing these services to independent publishers in the UK and now they have
teamed up with Allen & Unwin (A&U) in
Australia who will also offer this service in NZ.

The past few years have been a rollercoaster
for publishing worldwide. DPNZ and its shareholders believe that the investment
and support Copyright Licensing Ltd has made into digital publishing in NZ has
given the sector a comprehensive step-up that will enable NZ publishers and
authors to actively participate in evolving the e-book
world.

Digital-book publishers and retailers now know more about
their readers than ever before. How that's changing the experience of
reading.

It takes the average reader just seven hours to read the final book in
Suzanne Collins's "Hunger Games" trilogy on the Kobo e-reader—about 57 pages an
hour. Nearly 18,000 Kindle readers have highlighted the same line from the
second book in the series: "Because sometimes things happen to people and
they're not equipped to deal with them." And on Barnes & Noble's Nook, the
first thing that most readers do upon finishing the first "Hunger Games" book is
to download the next one.

For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and
private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page.
But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read,
transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public. Eben
Shapiro explains on Lunch Break. Photo: AP.

In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a
reader sits down with a book. Does the reader quit after three pages, or finish
it in a single sitting? Do most readers skip over the introduction, or read it
closely, underlining passages and scrawling notes in the margins? Now, e-books
are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not
only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them.

We Know What You Read

The perfect man, according to data collected by digital
publisher Coliloquy from romance-novel readers, has a European accent and is in
his 30s with black hair and green eyes.

For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an
intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of
digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the
activity into something measurable and quasi-public.
The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can
easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading
them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like
the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and
how much time they spend reading. Retailers and some publishers are beginning to
sift through the data, gaining unprecedented insight into how people engage with
books.
Publishing has lagged far behind the rest of the entertainment industry when
it comes to measuring consumers' tastes and habits. TV producers relentlessly
test new shows through focus groups; movie studios run films through a battery
of tests and retool them based on viewers' reactions. But in publishing, reader
satisfaction has largely been gauged by sales data and reviews—metrics that
offer a postmortem measure of success but can't shape or predict a hit. That's
beginning to change as publishers and booksellers start to embrace big data, and
more tech companies turn their sights on publishing.
Barnes & Noble, which accounts for 25% to 30% of the e-book market
through its Nook e-reader, has recently started studying customers' digital
reading behavior. Data collected from Nooks reveals, for example, how far
readers get in particular books, how quickly they read and how readers of
particular genres engage with books. Jim Hilt, the company's vice president of
e-books, says the company is starting to share their insights with publishers to
help them create books that better hold people's attentionFull piece at the Wall Street Journal

12:43 We talk to the executive producer of the highly
regarded TV film Siege, Philly de Lacey, and wonder if there's a lesson there
for our feature film industry.

12:48 After months of gushing talk about New Zealand
making the most of its time as the Frankfurt Book Fair's country of honour,
there are questions being raised over the way writers have been selected to
represent us.

1:10 At The Movies: The welcome return of the annual Film
Festival.

1:31 Visiting United States artist and Fullbright Fellow
Brinkley Warren is a young man with big ideas who believes that the creative
process can strengthen one's identity, and aid in the process of personal
transformation and growth. He's in New Zealand until February 2013, and has
seeded a project called Creative Soup Kitchens. He's been working with members
of Wellington's homeless community, providing them with free art supplies and
exploring their stories through art. Sonia Sly meets some of the artists
involved in the project, and chats to Brinkley about the value of contribution
and the need for social change.

1:41 Christchurch writer Fiona Farrell offers revealing
insights into life in the city after the earthquakes in her book of interviews
called The Quake Year. Her interviewees reflect on the past and look to the
future. The book is a Canterbury University Press publication.

2:05 The Laugh Track: TV directors Thomas Robins and David
Stubbs who created the Emmy award-winning Internet drama Reservoir Hill and are
now about to reveal their first TV series, Girl Versus Boy.

2:26 Sometimes coming second can be just as good as
winning. When Wellington film maker Catherine Bisley missed out on this year's
Script to Screen Scholarship, a special award was created just for her; a
coveted spot as a production assistant with New York indie kings Killer Films.
Justin Gregory went to see her at work.

2:38 Featured writer - Mike Nikolaidi, journalist, arts
administrator and now novelist. His book blending fact, fiction and memoir is
called A Greek Trinity: Tales from the Book of Michael and is published by
Steele Roberts.

2:50 Pop-up art galleries

Joey Vaessins is the young contemporary New Zealand art
lover who's behind a pop-up art gallery idea to make the most of Auckland's
empty buildings.

Barnes & Noble plans to launch a Nook digital bookstore in 10 countries within 12 months, with “one or more distribution agreements in place to sell Nook devices in certain countries outside the US prior to the 2012 holiday season". According to a 10-K form it has filed at the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the American bookseller said the international expansion plans were part of its partnership with Microsoft, announced earlier this year. The document said: “The company is also exploring opportunities to give consumers outside of the US access to its award-winning Nook portfolio of reading products through potential distribution partnerships yet to be announced. "While there can be no assurances, the company intends to have one or more distribution agreements in place to sell Nook devices in certain countries outside the US prior to the 2012 holiday season.” Waterstones was originally rumoured to be partnering with B&N to sell the Nook before it announced a partnership with Amazon to sell Kindles. Foyles c.e.o. Sam Husain has previously told The Bookseller he would not “rule out” any e-reader or e-book retailing option, including the Nook.

A book donated to Oxfam has sold at auction for £12,000 after an eagle-eyed specialist spotted it was a rare find.

The first edition of Samuel Beckett's Murphy was sold at the charity's annual Bonhams book auction and went for double the estimated price.

Murphy, published in 1938, was the first novel written by the Irish author and dramatist. The auctioned book is one of only 1,500 copies printed and one of the few that has survived with its original dust jacket.

The book was donated to Oxfam Books And Music in Berkhamstead, in Hertfordshire, and spotted by the store's book specialist Geoff Smith.

He said: "I'm absolutely delighted at the amount the book has raised for Oxfam. I knew as soon as I saw it that it might be important, but after some initial research on the internet it was clear that it was rare and likely to be valuable.More at the Telegraph

Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four author George Orwell’s 109th birthday just passed, and The Atlantic led us to an excerpt from the writer’s 1946 essay, Why I Write. The candid work reveals what Orwell believes are four explicit motives for writing. “They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living,” he mused. For Orwell, writers put pen to paper — or these days, fingers to keyboard — out of “sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.” The essay examines how these motives influenced his own work, then boldly concludes the following: “I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.”

We felt compelled to explore other reasons for writing as shared by famous authors. These honest and passionate declarations offer an intimate view into their processes, their life philosophies, and their humor. See if they inspire you, and then drop your personal favorites in the comments section below.Gustave Flaubert
The Madame Bovary writer died penniless, but he was a painstakingly dedicated and detailed scribe who worked tirelessly even though his output never matched his peers. Flaubert’s famous line, “Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living,” doesn’t mince words and mirrors his tenacious approach to the craft.More at Flavorpill

With News Corp making the spinoff of its
entire publishing business official, it remains to be seen how the newly formed
company will operate over the next few months, pending approval, and
afterwards, presuming regulatory bodies give the OK for the split. The new
business will start life with cash reserves and without any debt, and Rupert
Murdoch, talking to
Bloomberg Thursday, was appropriately bullish: "Our publishing
business is more valuable than people give us credit for...There are great
digital opportunities in publishing, and net-net, around the world, we’ll be
increasing our numbers and increasing our costs and hopefully increasing
revenues as well."

At a party for its authors in London
Thursday night HarperCollins UK ceo Victoria Barnsley also expressed enthusiasm
about the spinoff, according to the
Bookseller: "We are quite happy to make the news, but being the news
is less common. Today we heard that we will be part of a separate publishing
company. My gut feeling is that it is good news—we will be a bigger fish in a
smaller pond...We will have more clout. I think we will have more investment,
which will be good for all of us."

But on the US side, the spinoff news comes
as Harper has been streamlining departments and eliminating jobs. They did so
earlier this month with its sales force and now we've learned that William Morrow's
publicity and marketing departments will be reorganized "to bring the two
departments even closer together to capitalize on the strengths of each,"
according to a company spokesperson, mirroring the structure on the Harper
side.

Associate publisher Lynn Grady will now
oversee both publicity and marketing departments, while Seale Ballenger is
leaving the company after more than 8 years, most recently as vp, group
director of publicity for Morrow. In a note to colleagues Ballenger said he is
"feeling grateful and proud to be a part of its many successes and
accomplishments, and open to the plethora of possibilities that lay ahead of
me. I know that when a door closes, a window opens. I am energized to find that
open window and, like Alice and the looking glass, venture through it."

Price raised the bar of literary marketing twice in a single day. With a pair of Speedos, a horse and a vodka bottle, Amis could do the same

You are doubtless aware that these are difficult times for the book publishing industry. Physical book sales are down 5% year on year, with the increase in ebook sales insufficient to compensate. In Britain, the number of high-street bookshops has almost halved: 2,000 have closed since 2006.
Lost in Showbiz wouldn't pretend to know how to counter these problems, but it thinks it knows a woman who might. It gently draws the attention of the Publishers Association to the fragrant figure of Katie Price, and, more specifically, the whirlwind launch last week of In the Name of Love. This, you will be eager to learn, is the eighth in the brain-melting series of novels she once announced she "doesn't physically write", a reference perhaps to their basis in metaphysics, their restless probing of what Aristotle called aporia. Having spent time with In the Name of Love's predecessor, Santa Baby, Lost in Showbiz can confirm that few novels have ever caused it to question so thoroughly the very nature of being: no sooner do you start it than you find yourself wondering if there is any point in being alive.
But we digress. Back to the launch. What an event! Here was an occasion special even by the standards of previous Katie Price launches, including the one where she chose to promote her range of personalised iPods by appearing with them strapped to her head. It opened with the author appearing on a live, rearing black stallion and dressed in an orange satin bikini and matching mantilla. Lost in Showbiz offers up this image to the great and the good in the world of letters and says: frankly, my learned friends, you can stuff your essay-length review in the TLS and your learned profile in the Paris Review's Writers at Work series. This is how you get a novel noticed. It notes with interest that Martin Amis claimed to have read a number of Price's autobiographies as research and respectfully suggests that if he had taken a few pointers from their author vis-à-vis how to launch a novel, then perhaps the reviews of Lionel Asbo might have been a little kinder. It can't help but think if he had spent a little less time at the Hay literary festival boring on about the state of the nation and a little more time galloping about the site astride a noble thoroughbred, clad only in a pair of revealing swimming trunks, then the world would be a happier place. Come on, Marts! Get your Speedos on and saddle up!
Under any normal circumstances, this would clearly have been the highlight of the occasion. But it proved to merely be the amuse-bouche before the gut-busting main course that was the subsequent press conference, as reported in the indispensible journal of record Now! magazine. It was here that, while fielding questions about her former husband, cross-dressing kick boxer and new dad Alex "The Reidinator" Reid, that Price chose to favour the world with the information that she had once inserted a vodka bottle into his rectum.
In response, one onlooker reported, "the room fell silent".
Lost in Showbiz doesn't doubt that it did. Perhaps the assembled hacks were stunned by the sense that they had just witnessed history in the making. It's easy for hacks to be tired and jaded, but here was something genuinely new: a woman plugging a novel she hadn't actually written by publicly claiming that she'd sodomised her transvestite ex-husband with a vodka bottle. You don't get that on Radio 4's Open Book.
Or perhaps they were ruminating on the many additional questions raised by this revelation. What brand was involved? Do we espy a new opportunity for the former Jordan to implement one of her lucrative promotional deals with them? And, not least, what long-term effect might her revelation have on her former paramour's drinking habits? There's presumably only so many times a man can hear a bartender sniggeringly ask "Do you want that on the rocks, or does Sir prefer to … take it straight up?" before he decides to cut his losses and go teetotal.
Or perhaps they were simply noting that Price had now significantly raised the bar of literary marketing twice in the space of a single day. First, the rearing stallion/bikini combination. Now, Vodka Bottle Up The Bum-gate. Once again, Lost in Showbiz finds its thoughts turning to Martin Amis, delivering his next coruscating satire on the shortcomings of the underclass to his publisher, and discussing the subsequent publicity campaign. "Of course, Martin, in the past, your reputation and a series of broadsheet interviews in which you loudly decry the moral decrepitude of Britain would have been more than enough to secure a prime position in Waterstones. But I'm afraid the goalposts have shifted since we last met. I might as well ask you: have you ever stuck a vodka bottle up someone's bum? Perhaps you might consider it? Well, they don't have to enjoy it. Tell them to lie back and think of the Sunday Times Bestseller List."

Nothing is so debilitating to a copy editor as having to lavish care on illiterate tweets laced with obscenities. Last spring, The New Yorker ran Kelefa Sanneh’s piece on Earl Sweatshirt, the young rapper whose mother sent him to reform school in Samoa because he had fallen in with bad companions. After reading the piece seven or eight times, making sure that such immortal lines as “Shit sucks” and “LETS SWAG IT OUT” were rendered exactly as they were in the original, I was so disoriented that I stetted a big-ass mistake at the end. What was the point of making a fuss over a “than” for a “then” in a piece so full of profanity? There should be a detox facility for proofreaders who have undergone this kind of extreme experience. I did not know at the time that there was an informal contest going on at the magazine to see which writer could get the most instances of “fuck” into print, and that Sanneh was going head to head with David Remnick for the title. (You can’t write about rappers or boxers without quoting a few obscenities.) Ian Frazier gets a very satisfying ratio of profanity to regular speech in the monologues of his Cursing Mommy: “Somebody please tell me I have not lost my stupid goddam fucking drink.” This week, John McPhee writes about his battle to quote sailors saying exactly what sailors say, a battle that he did not win—at least not in TheNew Yorker of William Shawn or Bob Gottlieb. But he broke new ground in this piece by using “fuck”—as verb, noun, adjective, and interjection—fourteen times in a single paragraph.

Pauline Kael never tired of trying to get the word “shit” past Mr. Shawn in the old days, and never succeeded. She was on leave in the late summer of 1979, when “Apocalypse Now” came out, and Mr. Shawn permitted Veronica Geng, who was filling in for her, to quote the opening lines: “Saigon. Shit.” It no longer occurs to me to query the use of four-letter words, even when they are used gratuitously, as in “I missed the fucking bus.” I used to be a prude, but now I am a ruined woman. We had a discussion in the copy department a few weeks ago about how to style the euphemism: Shall it be “f”-word, f word, f-word, “F” word, F word, or F-word? I don’t like any of them. Fuck euphemisms. Get on the goddam fucking bus.This week, a reader who sent in a portfolio of mistakes she had found in the magazine (two out of six were blatant errors, for which we are truly sorry) cited the use of the term “star fucker” in a piece by John Colapinto about the philanthropist Trevor Neilson. She had no objection to the term itself, but wrote in the margin, “Need ‘activating’ hyphen!”

The 'mummy porn' book Fifty Shades of Grey has become the fastest adult paperback to sell one million print copies.

Fifty Shades of Grey, by former British television executive EL James

The Telegraph 28 Jun 2012

It's been a digital publishing phenomenon, with sales of the novel on the Kindle reaching one million earlier this week, but now Fifty Shades of Grey has broken print sales records too.

The first book in the trilogy has sold one million print copies in 11 weeks, beating The Da Vinci Code's previous record of sales of one million in 36 weeks.

According to Nielson Bookscan the book has also broken the weekly record for paperback sales, selling 397,889 copies.

The book beat JK Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which sold 367,625 copies in 2008.

EL James's novel has been dubbed 'mommy porn' due to its steamy plot lines. James, who was a former self-published Kindle Direct Publishing author said the books offer women a "holiday from their husbands".

The book is currently the 32nd bestselling book since records began in 1998.

Earlier this week Amazon confirmed that the novel had become the first ebook to sell one million copies for Kindles.
Author Dan Brown holds the record for overall weekly adult sales for The Lost Symbol hardback which sold 590, 964 copies in 2009.
JK Rowling still holds the single week record across all genres, for the last in the Harry Potter series.

NEW YORK (AP).- A rare atlas stolen a decade ago from the Royal
Library of Sweden by one of its chief librarians was recovered in New York
and given back to its rightful owner. Swedish and U.S. authorities showed off
the 415-year-old Wytfliet Atlas at a news conference Wednesday. The book,
created by Cornelius van Wytfliet and containing the earliest maps of the
Americas, had been in the Royal Library collection for more than 300 years
before it was stolen. There are only eight other copies worldwide, according
to the library. The atlas was one of 56 rare books stolen by Anders Burius,
the chief of the Royal Library's manuscript department, and the first of his
haul to be located. Burius stole the books between 1995 and 2004, nearly the
entire time of his employment there, and later committed suicide, said Steven
... More

This is the finale. We had a great march yesterday in Wellington and we hope
the Auckland march will be even better.

Reminder - the Auckland
Save TVNZ 7 Funeral March is tomorrow (Saturday 30th) at 4.30pm. Starting at Queen Elizabeth Square (Britomart) at 4.30pm, we then walk up Queen
Street, Victoria Street West, past TVNZ to St Matthew-in-the-City for speeches.
We know the media will be out in force to get shots of us filing past the TVNZ
building so please come along and show your support for public service
television.

As well as protesting the government's decision we are also mourning the loss
of our last public service television channel. Please bring flowers or a candle and tell your friends to
come along too. It's a chance to be amongst friends as we
remember and celebrate one of the best television channels in New Zealand's
history.

The weather forecast is
looking good so please come along for a fun, festive 'funeral'.